R&D's great but why a target for spending on it?

R&D's just lovely, it is, after all, how we develop the new technologies that are such an important part of economic growth. But we do hesitate a little bit when people start to say that we should have targets for spending upon something, whether it be R&D, poverty alleviation or education:

A "bold strategy” is needed to remedy weaknesses in Britain’s supply chain, according to the CBI, in a push to create 500,000 new jobs and boost the economy by £30bn.

The CBI feels a long-term target of 3pc of gross domestic product for public and private sector spending on research and development would underpin a turnaround over the next decade.

It's all a bit never mind the quality, feel the width, isn't it? For it's not actually true that devoting more resources to something is desirable: what we want is more output of whatever it is from the resources that we do devote to that thing. We could describe this as being almost Stalinist: don't worry about how good each car is but just weigh how much steel we put into each one! Or, another way of making the same point is that GDP, the thing we use to measure economic growth, is actually measuring value added in the economy. Except when we come to talking about government of course. There we've no idea what the value added is so we just assume that the output is worth the value of the resources devoted to producing it.

That's not an assumption that holds true in the real world of course: and so it is and would be with R&D spending. How much we spend on it isn't the interesting or important point: how much cool new stuff and shiny shiny we get from spending on R&D is.

The report shows a lack of investment in research and development, along with a growing skills crisis, has weakened “foundation industries” such as plastics, metals and chemicals.

It is also calling for a change in research tax credits to help innovation and incentives to encourage more graduates to take science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) degrees.

Creating a national materials strategy to protect and enhance critical supply chain sub-sectors and doubling the budget of Innovate UK are among other measures in the CBI programme.

It all does smack rather of that old industrial planning, doesn't it, where success is measured by resources consumed rather than the value of the output.

Finally, as an aside, encouraging more people to take STEM degrees is very simple indeed. The employers of those who graduate with STEM degrees should increase the wage they pay to those with STEM degrees. Rather than demand that the State subsidise the creation of a willing workforce.